Rodney Graham

Rodney Graham pulls at the threads of
cultural and intellectual history through photography, film, music, performance
and painting. He presents cyclical narratives that pop with puns and references
to literature and philosophy, from Lewis Carroll to Sigmund Freud to Kurt Cobain,
with a sense of humour that betrays Graham’s footing in the post-punk scene of
late 1970s Vancouver. The nine-minute loop Vexation Island (1997) presents the
artist as a 17th-century sailor, lying unconscious under a coconut tree with a
bruise on his head; after eight and a half minutes he gets up and shakes the
tree inducing a coconut to fall and knock him out, and for the sequence to
start again. Graham returns as a cowboy in How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999) and as both
city dandy and country bumpkin in City Self/Country
Self (2001) – fictional characters all engaged
in an endless loop of activity. Such dream states and the ramblings of the
unconscious are rooted in Graham’s earlier upside-down photographs of oak
trees. Inversion, Graham explains, has a logic: ‘You don’t have to delve very
deeply into modern physics to realise that the scientific view holds that the
world is really not as it appears. Before the brain rights it, the eye sees a
tree upside down in the same way it appears on the glass back of the large
format field camera I use.’ (2005)